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- "Enlightenment" - China's plan to lure top tech talent from overseas with houses and cash
"Enlightenment" - China's plan to lure top tech talent from overseas with houses and cash
Plus: Figma makes ChatGPT a visual canvas with Jambot
The Dispatch
August 25, 2023
Welcome to The Dispatch! We are the newsletter that keeps you informed about AI. Each weekday, we scour the web to aggregate the many stories related to artificial intelligence; we pass along the news, useful resources, tools or services, technical analysis and exciting developments in open source. Even if you aren’t an engineer, we’ll keep you in touch with what’s going on underneath the AI hood.
Good morning. Today we’re covering:
The latest in the tech cold war with China
Nvidia bulldozing lofty Wall Street expectations
A wild menagerie of machines at the World Robot Conference in Beijing
A new widget that brings ChatGPT to Figma with some creative flair
From Reuters: China is quietly restarting efforts to recruit top semiconductor and AI talent from overseas as the US tightens restrictions on Chinese chip development. Beijing’s controversial Thousand Talents Plan has been rebranded under the program name “Qi ming” (Enlightenment), providing incentives like bonuses and home purchase subsidies to lure experts to China.
More details:
Qi ming targets elite researchers and academics, especially PhDs from top US universities like MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. It focuses on sensitive fields like AI and semiconductors.
The revamped recruitment drive offers incredibly lucrative perks to lure away talent - including home-purchase subsidies and average signing bonuses of $420,000 to $700,000.
There is still wariness amongst Chinese expats about returning home due to China's political climate and weaker industry position versus the West. Some take roles at Chinese firms' overseas branches instead.
The US views Chinese talent recruitment as a threat, and has placed many export controls restricting support for Chinese chip progress. But curtailing leaks via talent flows remains challenging.
Takeaways: China's desperation for semiconductor talent is palpable, but shows a truly dogged determination towards achieving self-reliance. This tech war storyline has a number of complicated components attached to it. The US deeply fears loss of intellectual property and erosion of technological dominance/competitiveness, and their investigations into potential Chinese espionage have only heightened thanks to AI. These investigations are not only deeply worrisome for current researchers - they could also contribute to slowing the pipeline of invaluable academics coming to the US from China.
AI could fortify big business, not upend it; upstarts face an uphill battle
Illustration: The Economist
From The Economist (article is paywalled): The rise of AI is more likely to entrench corporate powerhouses than displace them, regardless of the industry. While previous giants like Kodak and Blockbuster were felled during past waves of technological upheaval, most incumbent businesses have already been integrating AI and leveraging data and distribution advantages that startups lack.
More details:
While most may not be comfortable turning to a chatbot from an unknown startup for legal advice, they may not have a problem with a large law firm like Allen & Overy using one to help its lawyers speed up mundane tasks.
Businesses in sectors like law, consulting and healthcare can train AI on proprietary data to help themselves stay ahead. Startups lack access to such troves.
Historically, few corporate giants fell even amid rapid tech change. Most Fortune 500 firms predate the internet era - only 52 of them have been founded since 1990.
Takeaways: Past technological shifts yielded a mix of continuity and change in corporate structures. This new phase will see a similar blend of reinforcement and realignment - or failure to do so. But as far as startups go: most aren’t aiming to be another Salesforce or Berkshire Hathaway. It’s never been easier to launch a business idea to see if it can fly with the help of AI; and for 90% of small businesses, incorporating AI has been a big win.
The more concerning element at work here is Big Tech getting Too Big as AI development continues.
 | Britain’s government announced it will be hosting November’s massive global AI summit at Bletchley Park - the site where mathematician Alan Turing famously cracked Nazi Germany’s Enigma code. Tech company executives, government officials and academics worldwide will meet to discuss the risks of AI. |
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has previously declared that he wants Britain to be the intellectual and geographical hub for AI regulation. "The UK has long been home to the transformative technologies of the future, so there is no better place to host the first ever global AI safety summit than at Bletchley Park," Sunak said. Meanwhile, the UK’s own proposed AI regulations have come under fire by Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission.
 | United Nations AI advisor Neil Sahota is warning that 2024 may be the "deepfake election," with AI-generated fake videos spreading misinformation and manipulation. Sahota notes that while tools are being developed to detect deepfakes, it's very difficult to fully verify or debunk them quickly. "Not much can be done right now to stop any of that." |
If a damaging fake video emerges right before an election, there may not be enough time to counteract it. Beyond viral deepfake videos, Sahota also expressed concern about the use of AI for micro-targeting and persuasion via platforms and ads.
Nvidia’s Q2 earnings prove it’s the big winner in the generative AI boom
See the coolest and strangest machines from the World Robot Conference
Germany proposes screening Chinese investment in AI and related sectors
The use of AI is seeping into academic journals - and it’s proving hard to catch
(Google DeepMind) Visualising AI: artist-created images and animations about artificial intelligence made freely available online
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 | Figma’s Jambot, a new FigJam widget that brings the power of ChatGPT into a visual, multiplayer canvas environment, has entered open beta. Jambot allows users to ideate, summarize, and riff creatively by connecting text-based stickies in a FigJam file. The widget has simple preset functions like "Ideate", "Summarize", and "Play" that generate AI-powered outputs from user input. |
Figma's goal with Jambot is to provide an alternative to pure text chatbots that is more visual, nonlinear, and collaborative. The engineers behind Jambot wanted to create a fun, game-like interface that makes AI more intuitive and leverageable for creative workflows - a way to enhance human creativity and productivity versus just offloading tasks to AI. While still early, Jambot hints at AI becoming a more multipurpose tool integrated into collaborative apps rather than a one-dimensional oracle.
 | Hugging Face just raised $235 million in a Series D round, bringing its valuation to $4.5 billion. The round included investments from major tech companies like Google, Amazon, Nvidia, and Salesforce, who want access to Hugging Face's library of popular generative AI models. Hugging Face is a hub for AI models and data and has benefitted from surging interest in AI. |
CEO Clement Delangue says the funding validates the importance of open source AI development, though the meaning of "open source" varies these days. He plans to grow the team and invest more in open platforms. For tech giants eager to build their own AI but dependent on community innovation, supporting Hugging Face's curated model marketplace makes strategic sense. Delangue claims the investments come “with no strings attached”. Let’s hope so.
Claude 2 is now available to customers on Amazon Bedrock
(Open source) Giraffe: Llama 2-based LLM taking the leap from 4K to an impressive 32K long-context window
(Open source) Supervision: a useful package for computer-vision developers
Social media/video/podcast:
Which professions are threatened by LLMs? [Podcast]
9 New Gemini leaks, Code Llama and a major AI consciousness paper [YouTube]
AI Startup Hugging Face Valued at $4.5B - Bloomberg interview [YouTube]
(Discussion) Elon Musk was working on his AI company while publicly calling for a pause on AI development [Reddit]
ChatGPT’s Code Interpreter is not just a data analyst tool, you can make videos and manipulate images [X]
Did you know?
Microsoft is exploring ways to bring AI capabilities to more areas of Windows 11 beyond just Copilot and Studio Effects. According to sources, the company is experimenting with adding object/person detection in Photos, optical character recognition in Snipping Tool and Camera, and generative AI painting in Paint.
While still early stage, these integrations would make AI a more integral part of the Windows experience. More substantial AI integration is expected in Windows' next major update in 2024. For now, Microsoft is focused on incorporating AI into Windows in an incremental, surface-level manner before going deeper.
Trending AI Tools & Services:
Kombai: a new model trained to understand and code UI designs like humans
IIElevenLabs: explore the most advanced text to speech and voice cloning software ever
Moonbeam: an AI writing assistant for long-form content
Synthesia: turn your text into AI-generated videos
TinyQuiz: turn any content into an interactive quiz
West Idol: transform a single selfie into a diverse professional photoshoot
The world has something along the lines of about a trillion dollars’ worth of data centers installed in the cloud. And that trillion dollars of data centers is in the process of transitioning into accelerated computing and generative AI. We’re seeing two simultaneous platform shifts at the same time.